Tag Archives: Social Media

Facebook has come a long way since its humble beginnings almost eleven years ago. From being just a wall of posts, it has morphed into a powerful aggregator with a wide variety of content. The trouble is that somewhere beneath all the content that you’ve created over the years, there are all your past indiscretions waiting to be discovered. Did you go on a liking spree when Pages were introduced and Facebook invited you to become a fan of your favourite personalities and brands? Did you post silly nonsensical content when you were in your early teens? Chances are all of that history is still available online for anyone to discover. If you want to break free from your silly, old Facebook days, here are a couple of steps that should help.

Limit Old Posts

Hide Old Posts in Facebook

Head over to Facebook Settings and select the Privacy tab. Under the subheading “Who Can See My Stuff?” you’ll have the option to “Limit the Audience for Old Posts”. This option will change the visibility setting of all posts that are either “Public” or “Friends of Friends” to only “Friends”. Be warned though, this action is non-reversible. The only way to undo this will be to go through your previous posts and change their settings one by one.

Unlike Pages

Bulk Unlike Pages in Facebook

Over the years your tastes have probably evolved. However, chances are that the pages that you became Fan of five years back are still a part of your profile. PageUnliker is a nifty website that fetches all Pages that you have liked, and gives you the option of unliking them. Save yourself the embarrassment and get rid of the things a younger you might have liked. You’ll also be tidying up your feed as posts from the pages that you unlike will no longer show up.

It’s been weeks since the Ice Bucket challenge went viral and became mainstream, but it’s still showing no signs of slowing down with more and more celebrities as well as thousands of common folks gleefully dunking themselves in frigid water to raise awareness about ALS.

Ice Bucket Challenge – Bill Gates

Now, Sapan Diwakar from Switzerland has created a nifty website which catalogues all celebrity Ice Bucket Challenge videos. The website already has almost three hundred videos featuring a wide spectrum of well-known personalities including presidents, tech innovators, sport stars, athletes, and Hollywood and Bollywood stars. You can scroll through the list, search for your favourite celebrity, or filter by tags. The website is responsive and works well in various form factors. There’s also an accompanying Android app for those wanting their dose of Ice Bucket Challenge videos on the go. However, the app is simply a repackaged version of the website and doesn’t offer any additional functionality.

Ice Bucket VideosIce Bucket Videos – Android App

The Ice Bucket challenge was initiated to raise awareness about ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Over the past month, it has managed to raise over eighty million dollars towards fighting ALS. This is massive considering that only $2.6 million was donated last year between July 29 and August 26. Right now donations are averaging $9 million per day. If you haven’t already, head over to alsa.org to learn more about ALS and contribute.

Reddit’s popularity has soared over the past few years; however, one thing that hasn’t changed is its appearance. There is no way to put this politely. Reddit.com is ugly. It’s fast and functional, but an eyesore. Even the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES), which adds dozens of super cool features to the Reddit website, leaves the appearance aspect largely alone. If you are looking for a completely revamped Reddit experience on your desktop, here are four options.

1. ReedditApp

This app is for Redditors wanting something simple and elegant. Reeddit has a simple three pane layout. The first pane lists the subreddits, the second lists the posts and the third displays images (including GIFs), self-posts and comments. The website is responsive and works well at a wide range of resolutions. Reeddit is solely targeted at the lurkers who mainly use Reddit for consuming information. There is actually no way to submit new content or comment and vote. Surprisingly, Reeddit also doesn’t support multi-reddits. Instead, it has its own implementation called Channels. ReedditApp is available for Mac, FirefoxOS, and the web.

2. Redditery

A lot of the content on Reddit are pictures. In fact several of the popular subreddits are completely image driven. Redditery is a simple web client that’s great for browsing through multimedia content. You can open any subreddit with Redditery, but the navigation bar disregards your subscriptions and offers a pre-curated list of popular subreddits.

3. Reddit.TV

Think of RedditTV as Reddit’s Leanback mode. It offers a continuous stream of popular video content from /r/videos and various other popular subreddits. To be honest this website itself pretty ugly. However, it is the best way to surf through the endless list of awesome videos that Reddit community regularly discovers.

4. Reditr

If you want a powerful, full featured Reddit client, then Reditr is your best bet. Reditr supports two modes. A TweetDeck like multi-column mode, and a more conventional single columns Stream mode. The multi-column mode is great for the heavy duty users as columns can be created from a multitude of sources including subreddits, multireddits, searches, and users. However, the dizzying amount of information that’s on display in the multi-column mode might be too much for most users. The Stream view offers a familiar single stream of updates, but with an enhanced user interface. Multimedia content and self-posts are displayed inline, and the top comments from every submission is also shown in the main stream. Reditr is extremely customizable and you can change almost every aspect of the interface including theme and background. It supports multiple accounts and allows you to even import your RES tags. It is available as a web app, Chrome extension, and Windows/Mac/Linux app.

Close on the heels of the website refresh, Facebook is pushing out a major revamp of its Android app. I am not a very big fan of the recent Facebook website redesign; it took an already cluttered user interface and made it even worse. Fortunately, the changes on the Android front are a lot more positive.

The new app feels a lot more vibrant and cheerful, mainly due to the use of lighter and brighter shades throughout the UI. Everything is also distinctively flatter.

The top bar has been split into two, and the navigation drawer on the left has been removed. The new layout is not only more visually appealing, but also more intuitive.

The upper half has just two buttons – one for Search and the other for accessing phone contacts. The second half contains all the navigation options including Friend Requests, Messages, Notifications, and Profile and Settings.

The new Android interface is more compliant with the Android design philosophy, and is definitely a step in the right direction for Facebook. Unfortunately, it’s still not ready for prime time. It’s currently only available for the Facebook alpha testers. If you want it right away, there are a few hoops you’ll have to jump through.

Go to the Facebook Alpha Testers group and signup with your Google account. This needs to be the same one that you’re using for the Play Store.

Once you’ve signed up successfully, you should be able to see the following page.

Follow this link to become an alpha tester. If all goes well, you’d be able to see a message stating “You are a tester”.

Now open the Play Store on your mobile phone, and you should be able to see an option to update Facebook. Download and install the update.

Go to Settings –> Apps –> Facebook. The current version of the Alpha build is 9.0.0.0.19. Your version should be same or higher.

‘Force Stop’ the app, and ‘Clear Data’.

Launch the Facebook app. You will have to sign in once again. Once you login, you should be able to see the new Facebook layout.

Please keep in mind that Facebook builds released in the alpha channel are expected to be buggy. They might be buggy, crash-prone, or might not work at all. If you want to go back to the normal build, simply “Quit the Test“, and un-install and re-install the Facebook app from the Play Store.

NASA has always been enthusiastic about its social media presence, be it videos on YouTube, short updates on Twitter or live video feeds on Ustream. Beginning Friday, NASA has now taken Instagram to the moon.

The new @nasa account on Instagram launched this Friday with classic vintage images of the moon and earth. NASA plans to use the account to inspire the public with new content and keep them updated on the image sharing platform.

NASA has since posted pictures of the launch of the agency’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) from Virginia. In two days alone the account has managed to amass a following of 51K and continues to grow like the rockets they keep pushing out.

Instagram has a large populace that wants to look at inspiring pictures that are not of the facial or edible kind, and NASA understands that. Press Secretory Lauren Worley said. “Instagram has a passionate following of users who are hungry for new and exciting photos. We believe we have some of the most engaging images on and off the planet — and we can’t wait to engage with Instagrammers.”

It has long been rumored that Twitter is looking to step into the music space. However, no one quite knew exactly what the popular micro-blogging service was planning. A short while back, Stephen Philips, the CEO of a music startup called “We are Hunted”, which was acquired by Twitter less than a week ago, officially announced Twitter #Music — a new music discovery service that is powered by Twitter conversations.

#NowPlaying Section in Twitter Music

Unlike previous Twitter features and services, #Music is not integrated with the existing Twitter experience. Instead, it is accessible via an independent web app and an iOS app (Android app will be launched later). The main purpose of #Music is to aid music discovery by surfacing music being played by your friends and shared by artists you follow, in addition to showcasing trending and emerging tracks. You can browse through band and artist profiles, view their top tracks, and get a taste of their music. By default, Twitter plays a short preview pulled from iTunes. However, if you are an existing Spotify or Rdio subscribers, you can log into your accounts to enjoy full tracks from their respective catalogues.

Twitter is aiming straight for the mainstream audience with its new #Music app. In addition to partnering up with two of the biggest players in the online music segment, it also went to Good Morning America to announce its new feature. Currently, Twitter #Music is restricted to US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand; however, more countries will be supported in the future.

After teasing us for months, Dots and Lines has finally introduced Carbon for Twitter in the Play store. Carbon made a name for itself on the WebOS App Catalog and Windows Phone Market as a gorgeous, intuitive, and powerful Twitter client for the masses as well as power users. Making the cut in the crowded Play app store will be tougher, but judging from the initial spate of downloads, there’s still room for a carefully crafted Twitter app for Android.

Carbon for Twitter makes a positive impression the moment you launch it. After a quick splash screen, you are asked to authenticate yourself, and within seconds your Twitter stream is laid out in front of you in neatly arranged cards. Two-finger downward swipe takes you to the bottom of the list, while a similar gesture in the upward direction will take you to the top. Swiping right will take you to the Mentions and Direct Messages screens. There are subtle animations for practically everything you do, and Carbon for Twitter feels alive in a way very few Android apps do. My favorite is the little card tilt animation that Carbon does while jumping in and out of a conversation. In spite of having a beautiful user interface that is livened up with thoughtful use of animations and clever gestures, Carbon feels fluid and fast. None of the lags and momentary freezes that are oh-so-common in Android are present in Carbon.

This is not to say that it’s all rosy with Carbon. The first version is understandably buggy, and crashes every once in a while. I have already had to reinstall it once to fix a crash loop. Carbon is pretty feature complete, and includes support for native retweets as well as classic retweets, lists, searches, hashtags, and trends. The Filters feature deserves a special mention, since it’s something I am only used to seeing on desktop clients. You can cleanup your Twitter stream by filtering out content based on people, hashtag, or keywords. However, power users might spot that a few features they are accustomed to using in other clients are absent in Carbon. Sync frequency can’t be changed (it’s either once every fifteen minutes or not at all), the app doesn’t have a widget, integration with third-party url shorteners and image uploaders as well as services like Twitlonger and Tweetshrink is absent, and video uploads don’t seem to be supported at all. Tablet support is also missing at this point. However, this is only the first version. I am sure that M.Saleh Esmaeili, the developer, wanted to get a working version out as soon as possible, and feature enhancements will come later.

Carbon for Android was initially supposed to be a paid app; however, since Play store doesn’t support payments in the developer’s country, he decided to release it for free. As of now, Carbon is a completely free app without any in-built advertisement. It’s the most visually attractive and fun Twitter client I have seen on the Android app store. If none of the missing features I listed above are dealbreakers for you, go ahead and take it for a spin. It’s still early days for Carbon, but it has definitely raised the bar for Android apps as far as aesthetics is concerned.

Facebook is reportedly testing a service which allows users to message strangers for a fee of $100 per message. When Facebook originally started testing this feature in December, they set the price at a mere $1 per message. Some Facebook users reportedly saw this fee appear when attempting to message Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, though others have seen it when attempting to message random users. This experimental feature has not yet been rolled out to all Facebook members.

When Mashable reached out to Facebook for comment, a spokesperson told them that “We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam.” This leads us to believe that Facebook will likely drop the price point of this feature before rolling it out to the general public.

If users would rather not pay a fee but still be able to message users outside of their network, they can choose to have the message land in the recipient’s “Other” folder. This folder seems to be an area for messages from strangers and other messages that Facebook thinks aren’t at the top of your priority list.

Would you pay $100 to message a stranger on Facebook? Let us know why or why not by leaving a comment on this post.

While Facebook’s one-click login button makes it really easy for users to signup for new apps and services, it also makes it ludicrously easy for malicious entities to get their hands on your private info. All they need to do is to create a quiz to lure you into sharing your Facebook profile data.

In a previous article we reviewed Privacyfix, which automatically identifies and highlights security issues in your Facebook and Google settings. One of the threats that Privacyfix identifies is app permissions. However, it doesn’t provide a quick way to withdraw access you have previously granted to various apps. Chances are that over the years you have allowed hundreds of apps to access your Facebook profile. Manually delisting them is likely to take quite a while. Thankfully, there is another browser extension, which can take care of this problem.

MyPermissions Cleaner is a handy extension for Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, which scans your Facebook profile and lists all apps that have access to your Facebook information, and allows you to revoke access to all apps with a single click. Ideally, you will not want to revoke access to all apps. For example, if you are an avid Instagram and Tweekdeck user, it makes sense to let these apps be. Thankfully, MyPermissions allows you to add select apps and services to a whitelist (Trusted Apps) with just a couple of clicks. Once you have whitelisted the apps you need, you can get rid of the rest of them with a single click. However, if you have several hundred apps in your list, then it might be easier to simply revoke permissions for everything and add back the apps that you use as and when required. MyPermissions Cleaner does a good job at exposing exactly what sort of info each app has access to, and allows you to filter apps by their access levels. The only trouble is that the extension doesn’t always work perfectly, and sometimes gets stuck while deleting an app. However, a page refresh generally takes care of the issue.

It’s not just Facebook alone, MyPermissions Cleaner currently also supports Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Dropbox, Foursquare, Instagram, Flickr, AOL, and Windows Live. For each of these services the app works in an identical manner, and offers to cleanup your app permissions. If you have never bothered to look into the apps that have access to you profiles on various networks, go ahead and do it now. Let this be your little end of the year cleaning.

Making it to the top isn’t easy, but staying there is even harder. And, Facebook is finding this out the hard way. Facebook Poke shot to the top of the free apps list in the iTunes App Store within a day of its release. Fast forward a week, and it has not only lost its #1 spot, but has vanished entirely from the top 10. In fact, Facebook Poke is currently languishing at #35.

Facebook Poke’s rise and fall shows that even if you already have a billion users, things don’t necessarily become easier for you. Sure, the massive existing userbase allowed Facebook to climb rapidly to the top of the App Store charts. However, once users discovered that Facebook’s app offers little that isn’t already there in Snapchat, interest waned. In the meanwhile, Snapchat, the service that pioneered the concept of self-destructing messages, climbed to the #4 slot. The fear of having to use real names while sending risqué messages might have also played a role in Poke’s quick fall.

Blindly copying features from other apps hasn’t worked out well for Facebook in the past either. Questions, which was perhaps inspired by the popularity of Quora, was shuttered fairly quickly. The check-in feature has fared comparatively better, but hasn’t managed to come anywhere near dethroning Foursquare, as the original ambition was.

Mobile is Facebook’s biggest challenge, and it won’t be able to conquer the segment by simply copying and iterating. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers in the world. Perhaps its time that it went into another lock-down and brainstormed ideas that can lend Facebook the decisive edge.